Zemindar (37 page)

‘A moment,’ he said in English, and then spoke in Hindustani to Ishmial. Ishmial paused before replying, listening to the chant grow slowly louder, and when he spoke his voice was emphatic. What he said escaped me, but Oliver nodded his head in agreement.

‘It’s a funeral procession,’ he explained. ‘They must be taking the body down to a
ghat
on the river. We must leave the track clear for them, there is probably quite a crowd.’

As he spoke he wheeled his horse off the track through some undergrowth, holding back the boughs for us to pass, and we found ourselves in a small clearing large enough for all and at the same time almost invisible from the track. He swung down from the saddle and stood with his arm across the gelding’s neck.

‘Would they make trouble if they found us in their way?’ I asked.

‘They would disregard us entirely—behave as though we didn’t exist.’

‘Then why this concealment?’

‘Merely a question of manners. The track is narrow, and people usually prefer to pursue their burial rites with some dignity. Also I have to think of Ishmial; at times like this, well, religious differences can be exacerbated and lead to insult. Not likely, but possible.’ He was matter-of-fact.

‘But would we …’ I began, but Oliver held his finger to his lips for silence.

The chant, that strangely disquieting yet unexcited repetition of four small syllables, was very near.

I had not dismounted, and found I had a reasonable view of the track through the foliage, and therefore of the procession as it began to pass. A party of men came into view, walking in twos and threes, all chanting—grunting, under compulsion to mouth the words, and beating their breasts with clenched fists in time to the chant. The body, wrapped in red cotton, was borne past on a string bed, pathetic but anonymous. Then more men, a score or more, shoulders touching, fists thumping, feet scuffling, faces set, and at the very last a girl, hardly more than a child, was half led, half carried across my range of vision. The poor young wife, I thought. For a second she seemed to look straight at me through the bushes, her head being thrown back as she was pulled along, her veil dragging in the dust. Her eyes held no expression—mere nothingness. Perhaps, I told myself, she was dazed with shock and grief.

As the girl passed, Oliver drew himself up quickly and took a step forward. I realized that he too must have seen her, and before I could analyse the strange expression on his face, he had pushed through the underbrush to watch the tail of the funeral disappear down the track, which forked in two a little further on. The chanting had died to an ominous drone before he came back, and I saw his face was white under the honey-coloured tan.

‘They have not gone to the river, they have turned into the forest!’ he said grimly as he mounted. Ishmial, aloft on his horse, seemed to understand, although Oliver had spoken in English. He uttered an imprecation and spat vehemently into the dust.

‘
Suttee
,’ he hissed, his eyes on Oliver’s.

‘What?’ I felt the colour drain from my face as the word entered my comprehension. ‘But it can’t be; it’s been illegal for years.’

Oliver merely regarded me with something like distaste.

‘
Suttee hai! Sahib, suttee hai
!’ Ishmial reiterated with excitement, as though he, like me, felt Oliver had missed the point. Oliver sat still in the saddle, his eyes narrowed, gazing into nothing.

‘Blast!’ he said. ‘God damn and blast ’em all!’

‘You must do something!’ I said frantically. ‘Oliver, you must stop them! You can’t just sit there and let it happen. At least speak to them, reason with them, threaten them with the law! She was only a child!’

‘Threaten them!’ His features were twisted with derision as he looked at me. ‘There were more than half a hundred men in that procession. To have been in it at all they were half a hundred fanatics. Moreover, they were well primed with
bhang
. They appeared quiet—far too quiet—but one word from me, or anyone not connected with them, would rouse them to a drug-induced fury which would have the lot of us torn limb from limb in seconds!’

‘But how can you know? Surely you are going to make some attempt …’

‘I know! I know too damned well! So does Ishmial there; ask him if you don’t believe me!’

‘Yes,
Mem-sahib
!’ said Ishmial, nodding in agreement and speaking in Hindustani for all that he seemed to comprehend so much in English. ‘It is very bad, very bad men, but we alone can do nothing—nothing! Very bad!’

‘What I cannot understand,’ Oliver mused more to himself than to me, ‘is their boldness in having the woman with them in broad daylight. It’s generally done at night and in secrecy.’

‘You mean it happens often; they burn the widows even though it’s been against the law so long?’

‘Not often, but it happens all right. These forest people are a law unto themselves more often than not. Still, I don’t like the open contempt of the authorities. It can only mean that for some reason they feel safe in doing now what they would never have attempted before.’

‘And so they are, if you really intend to do nothing!’

‘No, I’m doing nothing! You must suit yourself!’ He spurred the gelding through the bushes and was some way up the track by the time we emerged from the clearing.

It was a horrible ride back to Hassanganj in the full afternoon heat.

Among a multitude of conflicting sensations, my predominant feelings were of horror and aversion—a total aversion to the people among whom I found myself, their customs, their beliefs, and to the country itself. The contrasts of India were too brutal: its hidden aspects, when at length discovered, too repugnant; the ideas behind its acts too cruel. I could not attempt to reconcile the many facets of its existence, and no doubt I was silly to try. Contrasts exist everywhere, wealth and poverty, labour and idleness, squalor and beauty, but in India the conjunction was too extreme, too unexpected and … too apparent. Here no decent veils of convention were pulled across the open sores of life. I felt, overwhelmingly, a sickening hatred of India.

Jogging along, head bowed, eyes down, hands clasped on the pommel, regardless of where Pyari took me, I tried to exorcize the pain in my mind by reliving that little moment in time when the girl had appeared to look into my eyes. I strove to recall how she had been dressed. Had her head been covered, her clothes clean, her face pretty? But my memory brought forward only an impression of youth, and the lifeless gaze of dark eyes in a dark face. Had she known what lay before her? Had she acquiesced to it? Was it possible that she had gloried in it, as, it is said, the women of Chitor gloried in their terrible death? My imagination dragged me with the girl to her end: the heaped pyre by some small tributary stream, the leaping flames in the forest dusk, the two forms—one dead and inert, one alive and struggling—consumed equally but in what dreadful inequality of suffering.

At last the shade of the portico told me we had reached the house, and Oliver, dismounted, was waiting for me.

‘It would be better not to mention what we have seen to Emily,’ he said in a low voice as I drew up and he came forward to help me dismount. I nodded silently, not looking at him and not surprised to find that he too was now a part of my revulsion against India. As his hands touched mine to free the reins, an insistent ringing in my ears reached a crescendo. I thrust his hand away and practically tumbled to the ground.

‘Don’t!’ I cried with my hands to my ears. ‘Don’t! Don’t! Oh, don’t.’ And then I fainted.

I had eaten little that morning and drunk nothing; the ride had been long and hot, and my emotions had been most savagely harrowed. So my body took revenge, and I fainted.

I returned to consciousness in my own room, dark, cool and familiar, and lay for a moment savouring the sense of well-being my presence there brought me, but even as I struggled to open my eyes I knew there was something I must not think of, and fought against recollection.

Kate sat beside my bed, waving a palm-leaf fan. Something damp, cold and smelling of vinegar lay on my brow. I raised my hand to remove it, and in that moment the full memory of the condemned girl’s eyes leapt at me. My hand dropped back on to the sheet and I began to cry weakly, shamed, fearful and full of helpless pity.

‘There now, woman dear,’ said Kate, taking the cloth from my forehead and wringing it out in a basin before replacing it. ‘You’ll soon feel better when you’ve had a bite to eat. You’ve had a dreadful experience, and what is really bothering you is that you could do nothing about it, isn’t that it?’

I nodded, surprised to find that anyone else could resolve my feelings so easily and accurately.

‘Well, m’dear, that is always the hardest part of life, and the one thing we must learn to bear.’

I watched her in silence, grateful for the kind lined face with its bright eyes so unsurprised by evil. I wished I was old, really old, and experienced past shock.

‘Sure, and do we not all know the heartbreak of seeing others’ suffering and having no way of easing it? ’Tis the Man Upstairs Himself, and only Him, who knows the way of it, and the why of it. But maybe it will ease your mind a bit to talk of it, when you’ve had a rest and a sup. Wait now while I run downstairs and see what I can find to tempt you.’

‘I couldn’t eat anything at all,’ I gasped through tears and sudden shivering.

‘Och, you’ll manage a little clear soup no doubt when it’s put before you. Lie quiet, there’s someone else here to mind you while I’m gone.’

She patted my hands, wiped the tears from my face and beckoned to someone out of my sight. Then her black buttoned boots took her briskly to the door.

A figure came slowly towards the bed. Had I been capable of thought, I would have expected Emily, or perhaps Bhujni, my
ayah
, but in my confused condition I was hardly surprised when Oliver Erskine came to the bedside and sat down in the chair Kate had vacated.

‘Better now?’ he asked quietly.

I nodded, wondering without interest what had brought him to my bedside—anxiety, kindness or guilt? He could not be feeling proud of his part in the morning’s drama. What was it he had said about the leper? ‘There are some things one must accept.’ What an easy, trouble-free idea to go through life with. He probably didn’t care a button about the wretched girl hauled to the flames; that too was something one must accept. Was it cynicism? Or gross insensitivity? Or merely a dedication to his own ease of mind that made him so impervious to the claims of his own kind?

He had been sitting silently beside me for some time when I turned my aching head towards him, trying to get my eyes to focus on his face.

‘I believe you’ve had a touch of the sun to add to everything else,’ he remarked coolly. ‘That damn fool headgear you wear. You need something with a bigger brim!’

It was a silly hat, but, with its curling frond of ruby feathers, a very smart one, and I clung to it, since Charles once said it suited me.

I narrowed my eyes and his face became clearer. The effort required made me see it as though for the first time. Why did he appear so different? It was the same face, yet not the same. He began to speak, but I ignored his words and went over the features slowly and carefully: the brown hair bleached where the sun caught it, the broad forehead and prominently arched nose (a little crooked it was too), the wide mouth, the cleft chin, the hazel eyes that were amber sometimes, sometimes gold, narrow below heavy lids fringed with straight black lashes. The same face but, I now realized, a different expression. A pleasant, open expression, I saw with surprise. It was as though the active principle that forged meaning in the eyes and twisted the lips into smiles or sneers lay passive for once: as though he had for a moment dropped the mask he chose to wear and allowed himself to be seen undefended by self-consciousness.

He stopped talking when he found I was not listening, and allowed me to scrutinize his face with equanimity.

‘Well?’ he said at length, unsmiling. ‘Satisfied?’

His words pulled me up. I was embarrassed that he should have witnessed my undisguised curiosity.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, looking away. ‘I’ve never seen you so … so, well …
kind
before.’

‘Am I such a monster then?’ And he smiled.

‘No, not…’ I began, but explanation was too much of an effort. I closed my eyes and lay still, wishing he would go away and leave me in peace. Only a short while before I had felt I hated him, yet now here he was taking some sort of interest in my welfare and I could think of him as kind. Why didn’t the confusing creature remove himself? I kept my eyes shut, but he stayed.

After a time, when I could hear him fidgeting in his chair, probably debating whether to stay or go, he said, ‘Laura, are you awake? If you are, there are some things I feel you ought to know, as soon as possible. They’ll help you to feel better. Will you listen to me while I talk? Will you pay attention? You need not open your eyes; I know what a sun headache is like.’

So naturally I immediately opened my eyes.

‘What else must I know? You have already told me there are things I must accept,’ I pointed out with bitterness.

‘There are several things about what happened this morning that are not at all as you think them to be now. I know that you will not sleep or rest—tonight or for many a night—while your imagination is allowed to fuel itself on ignorance. That is why Kate asked me to speak to you. She knows a great deal about such matters, about India and Indian ways and how they strike a young woman from England, and she can probably understand your feelings better than you do yourself at the moment.’

I shook my head on the pillow and the damp cloth fell away.

‘But … but that poor girl, and all those horrible men hauling her away to her death!’ And I began to cry again. He took both my hands in his and held them, saying nothing. ‘If only I hadn’t seen it. Nothing is so bad when you only hear about it. Oliver, why … why didn’t you help?’

‘I’m not God Almighty, and I told you why at the time!’ There was a note of asperity in his voice.